Bio: 

Selma defended her doctoral thesis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition (Boston, Massachusetts) in June 2018 titled “Dietary diversity, dietary quality and sustainable dietary surveillance”. Under the mentorship of Dr. Walter Willett, Selma evaluated newly developed diet quality metrics in relation to common pregnancy complications in the U.S. Nurses’ Health Study II. In 2015-2018, Selma also led the design and implementation of the first population-based dietary study in Bosnia and Herzegovina in collaboration with the Bosnian Office for Statistics, and used newly developed diet quality metrics to evaluate demographic and socioeconomic predictors of dietary quality among Bosnians. Previously, Selma worked with Dr. Kirsten Davison in analyzing the role of parenting in childhood obesity. During her master’s studies at the University of Westminster (London, UK), she developed and implemented dietary guidelines for preschool settings in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Project summary: 

The recently developed Prime Diet Quality Score (PDQS) is a novel, fully food-based and easy-to-administer score and a promising candidate for measuring sustainable diet globally. However, to become fully operationalized as an alternative to current metrics, PDQS needs further evaluation and refinement in different contexts and using different types of dietary data. The aim of this project is to develop and validate a new diet assessment tool based on the PDQS in Tanzania and the U.S. Specifically, the study will develop a diet assessment tool based on the PDQS as a stand-alone instrument, with potential variations, and assess the validity of this questionnaire across different country settings, as well as refine the PDQS for use with the 24h recall data